Here comes Clay Shirky

In his best-selling book, Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky set out his thesis that we are at the dawn of a new age, seeing the formation of a different kind of society with a vast increase in human creativity. He says: “The change of expressive capability comes about from the fusing of two old communication patterns.”

One communication form has been broadcasting and print ­ TV, radio and newspapers ­ where messages are sent out from the centre. The second form is two-way communication, where people talk to each other on the phone. For the first time ever, according to Shirky, we now have a two-way communication tool that is also good for groups. The internet supports group action, allowing many-to-many communication where people can come together.

“When you start to think of anything that matters in society, anything that has worth or longevity involves groups,” he says. “When, in the historical context, you have suddenly the situation where the work of groups becomes much easier, you start to see all kinds of remarkable effects.”

“Mass amateurisation” is one of the key changes ushered in by the technological revolution, but Shirky declines to be drawn on whether it is a positive or a negative. “While I am an optimist and not a utopian ­ there are certainly downsides ­ I try not to make value judgements.”

Shirky says the only historical analogy he can find for mass amateurisation is the rise of literacy after the spread of movable type.

“I use the term mass amateurisation to counteract the sense that every individual is becoming a professional publisher.”

He argues that by definition a large professional class cannot exist. “My theory is we are living in this period of mass amateurisation where there is always a spectrum, from the rank amateur sitting in his bedroom to the news network anchorman.”

Shirky dismisses the notion of information overload being a modern issue. He says that the moment you have more than 1,000 books in your library you have information overload. “It is a problem that well pre-dates the current era.”

The rise of the internet has seen a 180-degree switch from a paradigm of filter, then publish, to one of publish, then filter.

“What we’ve always done up until now is apply the quality filter at the publisher level in advance of taking on the expense of publishing a book, putting on the show, or whatever.

“Now, if anyone can publish anything at any time ­ as they frequently do if you wander around the web’s low growth ­ you can’t filter for quality in advance. There is no professional point at which the filter can be joined up to production. All the filtering has to be after the fact.

“This produces a profound change in everything from the economics of publishing to the nature of library science. All the professional activity geared around the idea that to publish is a special behaviour is now up for grabs.”

If you agree with Shirky’s thesis, it doesn’t take a lot to see it has huge impact on information professionals.

Shirky says: “The entire weight of the information science profession is shifting from organised to disorganised. Early attempts to organise internet-scale information, such as Gopher were all attempts to apply some sort of categorisation, almost like the British Library. Even Yahoo, the first web native company, had a top-level ontology and a staff ontologist, a notion that now seems faintly risible.”

Online onslaught
Ultimately all those efforts failed under the digital onslaught. According to Shirky, it was Google that came up with the notion of extracting order rather than trying to impose it. In Google’s world, information is findable by the user but is not ordered upfront. That shift is happening wherever there is a superabundance of information, which is to say everywhere.

So did Shirky choose his book’s subtitle, The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, simply to upset information businesses?

“What I meant by that was that we used to assume that if we saw large-scale organised behaviour we would say that there is some large managed government, private or non-governmental organisation behind that. When you look at an open source system offering or Wikipedia, you see large-scale order but you don’t see a company that is hiring everybody to do the work.”

Shirky doesn’t think that networks will replace hierarchies, as some suggest; he dismisses what he calls the Powerpoint slide he has been seeing for the past 10 years depicting hierarchies as the old way and networks as the new way. He says what is coming is not wholesale replacement but a period of fairly complicated hybridisation.

There have always been loose social networks, Shirky says, and cites the scientific community as an example of a network enterprise. “The monopoly on directed action no longer exists with managed institutions. There are now places where we have directed action that does not come from a CEO down to the rank and file.

“Companies in many sectors ­ especially in the information industry ­ are trying to figure out how to come to some sort of accommodation with this new reality.”

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